A Comedy On This Day: Six Dates With Barker - 1970: The Odd Job (22 January 1971)

  Appropriately for a production made during the ITV colour strike, it’s a black comedy. Suburban middle-class clerk Arthur (Barker) wants to kill himself when his wife walks out, can't face it himself and so hires eccentric handyman Clive (David Jason) to kill him. Then he changes his mind...

 This is a good example of how the two modes of production (studio and film) dovetailed together in a comedy, with interior and exterior sequences having a different feel and inspiring a different sort of laughter. The studio scenes in the flat work within a classic farce tradition while the pleasures of the long filmed chase sequence are more whimsical, the expansiveness and incongruity with which the suburban roads become the site of a wild west stakeout. I was most amused by a well-worked special effect/prop, when some shredded wheat dissolves once milk poisoned with hydrochloric acid is poured over them.